Your Daily Tech Fix

When Facebook went public in 2012 many investors called it a disaster. The first shares of the company were bought by investors for $38. But the stock crashed after the IPO, going down as much as 50% in the coming month and finally reaching a low point at around $14 when the company couldn’t deliver on mobile advertising growth and user growth over the next few quarters.

Well how things have changed and if you went long on Facebook at any point in the past you made the right bet.

Facebook closed at $74.98 which values the company at $192.4 Billion! In the past 12 months the stock has increased by 183%, the surge now mainly comes from impressive mobile growth numbers.

Here are the financial highlights:

Revenue: $2.91 Billion (YOY increase of 60.5%)

Mobile revenue increased 151% compared to last year, now accounting for 62% of total advertising revenue

Net Income: $1.1 Billion

Cash: $11.45 billion

These are all pretty impressive numbers and the same goes for the user base of Facebook. The company now has 1.32 billion users, of which 399 million are active mobile users (compared with 219 million in the same period last year).

The captain of the social giant, Mark Zuckerberg, is of course benefiting from the continued growth as well. With the current stock value he added a cool $1.6 billion to his net worth and is now ahead of Google founders Page and Brin on the rich list.

Facebook has continued to focus on expanding the business as well through acquisitions. Given the continued growth of the user base and the fact that the large acquisitions such as Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus VR have yet to generate revenue gives the company a bright future.